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Lost in the School Choice Maze

Radcliffe Saddler, an eighth grader who is an honors student from Brooklyn, did not get into any of the high schools he initially picked. “I feel like I did something wrong,” he said.Credit
Emily Berl for The New York Times

ON the last day in March, when most eighth graders in New York City learned where they would be going to high school in the fall, Radcliffe Saddler watched the majority of his classmates rip open thin envelopes and celebrate.

Some students opened thick envelopes just as he did and started crying. Radcliffe, an honors student at Isaac Bildersee Middle School in Canarsie, Brooklyn, was determined to hold in his emotions until he got home.

His trip involved the usual two city buses and took 45 minutes. When he walked into his family’s small apartment in East Flatbush, he showed his mother the letter saying he had not gotten into any of the nine schools he had applied to. Then he ducked into his room and cried.

“I felt like I never worked hard enough,” Radcliffe, 14, said softly a few days later. “To see other people get in, I feel like I did something wrong.”

He may have felt like it, but he was not alone. The Department of Education’s dizzying, byzantine system for students to select a public high school left a total of 8,239 — about 10 percent of the city’s eighth graders — shut out of all their choices, and their parents feeling inadequate, frustrated and angry.

They were told to ponder “What next?” — with just two weeks to research and apply to a new set of schools — even as the bitter question “Why?” still lingered.

The answer is more complicated than the toughest word problem in any high school math class.

In 2004, in an attempt to create more choices for parents beyond the large neighborhood high schools that were seen as dumping grounds, and while trying to make the process more equitable, the Education Department instituted an elaborate process to match students and schools.

Eighth graders are asked to apply to up to 12 schools in order of preference; high schools then rank applicants without seeing where the students ranked them. (This does not include the nine specialized high schools that require separate entrance exams or auditions.)

In some cases, the borough or the district where a student lives gives residents priority. Thirty percent of the city’s schools — usually the most coveted and, therefore, the most competitive to get in — use a screening process with their own criteria: seventh-grade standardized test scores, grades and attendance, plus open-house visits, essays or exams.

A computer then compares the two rankings, using the same algorithm developed to match medical residents with hospitals.

This year, of the 78,747 students who applied, the computer matched 83 percent to one of their top five choices. An additional 7 percent were matched to schools lower on their lists. The rest, like Radcliffe, were unmatched. Over the past three years, officials said, there has been a slight but steady increase in the number of unmatched students, up from 8 percent last year and 7 percent in 2009.

Photo

After more than 8,200 eighth graders learned they had not been matched with a high school, families gathered at Martin Luther King Jr. Educational Campus in Manhattan in April to learn about the remaining options available.Credit
Emily Berl for The New York Times

One new variable this year was the department’s publishing of graduation rates in school descriptions, which caused a surge in applications to the best schools, said Robert Sanft, the chief executive of the Office of Student Enrollment. The competition at many of those top schools meant long-to-impossible odds. Baruch College Campus High School, with a 100 percent graduation rate, received the most applications from across the city: 7,606 for 120 seats, giving it an acceptance rate of about 1.6 percent (Harvard, by contrast, accepted 6.2 percent of its applicants.)

But geography was a significant factor for Baruch, especially for those who, like Radcliffe, applied from outside Manhattan. According to Baruch’s principal, Alicia Perez-Katz, the school, created for Manhattan’s District 2, has not accepted out-of-district students in many years, a fact not mentioned in the Education Department’s school profile.

Mr. Sanft said there was no one answer to why so many of the city’s children were unmatched. “It could be a combination of factors,” he said, “listing too few choices, overconfidence at reaching the choices for which they might not have qualified, the information available based on their record.”

Despite hosting admissions fairs and offering application guidelines in the encyclopedic 534-page high school directory, which includes 647 programs at 394 schools, plus the nine specialized schools, the department has acknowledged it needs to make its information more accessible to parents. Claudette Saddler, Radcliffe’s mother, said she had been overwhelmed by the process.

“This is like a big maze and you are the little creatures just walking around,” Ms. Saddler said. “It’s like, ‘Somebody please help me.’ I thought it would be simpler for the parents”

Aiming High to Succeed

The Saddlers stand in the middle of the socioeconomic divide in New York City, between the obsessive upper-middle-class parents who fill out spreadsheets to chart their children’s admissions and the uninvolved parents who leave it to guidance counselors to complete the forms.

Radcliffe is the oldest of three boys. Ms. Saddler and her husband, also named Radcliffe Saddler, immigrated to the United States from Jamaica within the past 10 years in part because they wanted to provide a better (and less expensive) education for their children.

Mr. Saddler, a house painter and graphics designer, is struggling to find work and is considering returning to school to get his M.B.A. Ms. Saddler is not working while she finishes her bachelor’s degree.

In hindsight, the Saddlers know they made mistakes in the selection process. They said they had trouble arranging open-house visits around their schedules, but thought Radcliffe’s excellent grades at Isaac Bildersee — he had a 94.18 average in seventh grade — would suffice. But while Radcliffe scored 3.56 out of a possible 4.5 on his state math exam, he scored 2.94 in English; many of the schools he applied to wanted 3s or 4s.

Radcliffe’s first choice was Millennium High School in Manhattan, where 5,266 students applied for 150 spots. His ninth and last choice was the program for science and math at Midwood High School in Brooklyn.

His guidance counselor, Watson Mareus, was overloaded by working with more than 350 students. Radcliffe acknowledged that Mr. Mareus originally advised him to consider a broad range of schools, but it felt to him as if he were saying, “Don’t aim too high.”

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Radcliffe Saddler, right, with his parents, Claudette and Radcliffe Saddler, and his brother Anthony, attended a schools fair in Manhattan.Credit
Emily Berl for The New York Times

“If we all didn’t aim high,” Radcliffe said, shrugging his shoulders, “where would we be?”

Mr. Mareus said in an interview that once Radcliffe submitted his list, signed by his parents, in December, it was not his place to change it.

Still, he said he was shocked when Radcliffe was shut out while students with below-average grades got into Midwood. “There was nothing I could tell the parents,” Mr. Mareus said. “I was baffled.”

Radcliffe was thrown into the so-called supplemental round, in which unmatched students had to select from a list of schools that still had spaces available. Some were new schools without track records, others were large neighborhood schools, and still others were on the city’s “schools in need of improvement” list. Families had until April 15 to return their new lists of choices to guidance counselors. Schools are now going through a second round of ranking, using the same criteria as in the first.

Students will hear on May 27 where they matched in the supplemental round. (Their assigned schools can be up to 90 minutes from home.) Anyone displeased with a match has until June 3 to appeal. It could take until the end of June for that process to be completed.

Starting the Next Round

With little time last month to dwell on the initial rejection, parents and students got to work. At 6 p.m. on April 5, thousands stormed through the doors of Martin Luther King Jr. Educational Campus in Manhattan like shoppers on the day after Thanksgiving. The schools were grouped by borough on three floors, and the hallways were jampacked.

As the tenacious rushed past the dazed, a man strummed an out-of-tune guitar at the Brooklyn School for Global Studies table, lending a plaintive tone to the already anxious night.

The Saddlers, with Radcliffe’s 7-year-old brother, Anthony, in tow, wandered from table to table on the third floor, which had Brooklyn schools.

They passed Norkhila Sherpa of Flatbush, who came from India and entered the seventh grade in the middle of the school year. She finished with an 80 average — though she now has a 90 — and that hurt her chances at her seven choices, including Manhattan/Hunter Science High School and Midwood.

The table for the new Brooklyn outpost of Millennium High School was the busiest among the Brooklyn group. With about 40 spots left to fill for the new class of 108 students, the incoming principal, Lisa Gioe, 39, a Brooklyn native and currently the principal at the Math and Science Exploratory Middle School, acted as recruiter and therapist.

She took down names and consoled parents who cried, distraught over their children’s being unmatched.

“Brooklyn families are tough and they’re trying to figure out what to do,” Ms. Gioe said. “They are resilient and they don’t take no too often. I love that.”

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Radcliffe, at home in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, had rejected his guidance counselor’s original advice to apply to a broad range of schools, saying it felt as if the counselor were saying, “Don’t aim too high.”Credit
Emily Berl for The New York Times

Julia attends a specialized Manhattan school, Ballet Tech, but had decided to forgo dance in high school. She originally applied to six schools, including some of the most competitive in Manhattan, and Midwood. She had an 88 average in seventh grade, but also 40 tardy days, which may have hurt her.

“The difference between an 87 and 88 to a parent may not be consequential,” Mr. Sanft said at the fair that night, after he addressed parents’ concerns. “But it may be to a principal deciding between 98 and 99.”

“We can’t emphasize enough for parents to maximize their choices,” he added. “We can’t tell you how often they apply to one or two schools. Ultimately, you are competing with several thousands of candidates, and your child may be a bubble candidate.”

Some schools will eliminate a candidate based on poor attendance or on a record of more than 10 late days. Radcliffe had five absences and was late 19 times in seventh grade. He said he took the city bus alongside commuters who routinely pushed him aside in line and left him waiting for the next one. But neither he nor his parents realized they could explain his circumstances as an unofficial part of his application.

Even though a computer sorts the information, the process also involves a high degree of diligence and strategy from students, parents and guidance counselors, going beyond submitting raw data and showing raw potential.

Ivie Bien-Aime, the parent coordinator at Radcliffe’s school, said parents had to be aggressive early in the process, choosing appropriate schools and visiting them. “There’s a grooming phase,” Ms. Bien-Aime said. “I tell parents to go to meetings, to open houses, call the principal, let them know you are interested. If they don’t see your face, you’ll be just another number.”

Information drives any choice system in the marketplace, said Henry M. Levin, a professor of economics and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. In the high school admissions process, information really is power.

“The upper-middle-class families have more of it; they can look at mavens who have gone through the process and can tell others how to game the system,” Dr. Levin said.

Sean P. Corcoran of New York University and Dr. Levin conducted a study, “School Choice and Competition in the New York City Schools,” that showed black and Hispanic students in the city in 2008 tended to rank better-performing schools outside their neighborhood as their first choice, but more often ended up being accepted at local schools more like their middle schools.

It was impossible, Dr. Corcoran said in presenting the findings last month at a New School panel, for every student to go to a school better than his or her middle school, since there were only a small number of competitive high schools.

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Norkhila Sherpa, 14, who did not get her first choices of high school, was accompanied by her mother, Nima, left, and her aunt, Lakpa, right, at an information session in Manhattan last month.Credit
Emily Berl for The New York Times

Still, Dr. Levin said they found the department’s system far more equitable than it had been. “We’re never going to make it more level,” he said. “What we have to do is make it more nearly level.”

Clara Hemphill, founding editor of Insideschools.org and a longtime observer of school choice, says the problem is a fundamental one: There are not enough good schools. “The big gap is in good schools for the average student,” Ms. Hemphill said. “I spoke to kids this year who had a 92 average and all 4s who didn’t get matched anywhere, even though their choices were reasonable,” she added. “School choice by itself doesn’t fix schools. Even if we gave everybody perfect information, it wouldn’t solve the problem.”

New Lists of School Choices

At the supplemental-round fair, Radcliffe and his parents met Rashid Davis, the dynamic 40-year-old principal at P-Tech — Pathways in Technology — a new school in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, backed by a $500,000 commitment from I.B.M. and an agreement with City College to offer an associate’s degree at the end of six years.

P-Tech gives priority to Brooklyn students and those who attend an information session. The day after the fair, the Saddlers attended a session for the school, which had 46 of 108 spaces open.

P-Tech is a prime example of the city’s recent investment in small schools that focus on career-oriented education while it closes larger, struggling schools. P-Tech and the Academy for Health Careers will be at Paul Robeson High School, which is being phased out because of poor performance (it had a 50 percent graduation rate last year).

In the new school, Radcliffe and his parents saw opportunity, and he made it his first choice. “It’s like the new baby coming around,” Radcliffe said of the city’s support. “They’re going to look after it.”

Two days after he submitted six new choices, Radcliffe was told by a teacher that he was in the running to be Isaac Bildersee’s valedictorian. “I felt that my work is paying off,” he said.

Julia Jacobson, meanwhile, was called in for an interview at Brooklyn Millennium, her first choice in the supplemental round, the day after applications were due.

Her father had carefully managed the process; he worked with Julia on her essay. He asked a friend who is a principal in Brooklyn to write an e-mail on Julia’s behalf. He sent Ms. Gioe a note about his being president of the PTA. (Ms. Gioe said in an e-mail that anything extra that parents sent made no difference and that she was looking only at the data to rank students: test scores, grades and attendance.)

Norkhila Sherpa, 14, said she made Clara Barton High School in Brooklyn her top choice because it had a special honors program. “If it isn’t good, then we’ll look to transfer,” she said, not knowing that process was even more complicated.

For the next three weeks, all any of these students, and the thousands like them across the city, can do is wait nervously for the computer to run its algorithms. They have completed the hard part — twice.

For Mr. and Ms. Saddler, however, the process has just begun. Their middle son, Theodore, is now a seventh grader.

“It’s going to be easier next year for my brother,” Radcliffe said, shaking his head. “This was an experience that I will never forget.”

A version of this article appears in print on May 8, 2011, on page MB1 of the New York edition with the headline: Lost in the School Choice Maze. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe